He Represents The Meeting Of Two Cultures

March 28, 1985|by PHYLLIS GUTH , The Morning Call

His grandfather was president of a steel company; his father was a doctor, his uncle, an ambassador. During his childhood, he lived in a home with 13 servants and two chauffeurs and attended school in a monastery.

Such was Rev. Alejandro's Garcia-Rivera's comfortable family life in Cuba - until Alejandro, then 9, did so well in a national test administered to school children that the government planned to send him to Moscow for training.

Disturbed by this, his parents put him on a plane by himself and sent him to Miami where he stayed with an aunt for a short period until the rest of the family could join him.

Today Rev. Garcia-Rivera, better known as Pastor Alex, is in Allentown on a unique mission. The first graduate of the Lutheran Church's only program for Hispanic ministry, located at Chicago's Lutheran School of Theology, he's trying to create a new model, the establishment of "a Spanish-speaking expression with its own identity and customs" within the confines of St. Paul's Evangelical Lutheran Church.

"It's very low key," Pastor Alex says of his efforts to reach area Hispanics. His position here is funded by the Northeastern Pennsylvania Lutheran Synod, the Lutheran Church in America, the Allentown Area Lutheran Parish and St. Paul's.

"Most of the time, people come to me and ask to be members. The atmosphere I want to give people is 'You can feel comfort here' if they want to be part of our communion of faith," says Pastor Alex.

Lighting a pipe in his study, he recounts his family's entry into the United States. "We went from riches to rags," he muses. With the exception of a few pieces of jewelry they brought with them, the family lost everything. Although poor, they were never on welfare, he says.

It is his background and experiences as an exile that make him ideally suited to working with Lehigh Valley's Hispanic population, local clergymen believe. "Being part of a refugee family gives him a tremendous sensitivity as far as what we're doing," says The Rev. Glenn Schoonover, St. Paul's senior pastor.

The Rev. Denton Kees, executive director of the Allentown Area Lutheran Parish, says Rev. Garcia-Rivera represents a meeting of the Anglo and Hispanic cultures. "He handles that very gracefully," Rev. Kees notes. Citing the experiences Rev. Garcia-Rivera brings with him to his position here, the executive director says: "He challenges the rest of us to be more sensitive to our Hispanic brothers and sisters."

Sensitivity to people of other cultures is a very real issue to Pastor Alex. Coming as he did to the United States as a boy, he found the new adventures stimulating, but "the violence and lack of kindness" accorded him and his family led him to believe at one time that he was "less than a human being."

Once, before learning English, he inadvertently wandered into a Miami neighborhood off limits to Hispanics. There, he was beaten by several youths who broke his leg in five or six places. Then, in the hospital, he encountered nurses who refused to change his bed. Surprisingly, he relates this matter-of- factly without the bitterness one might expect from a person who has suffered rejection many times.

Three years after they fled to this country, the family was relocated by the government to a Cincinnati suburb where Alejandro saw snow for the first time. As in Cuba, his intelligence was recognized, but was rewarded in a different fashion. He was a finalist in the International Science Fair, and a winner in the Westinghouse Talent Search.

At Miami University, Oxford, Ohio, where he studied physics on science scholarships, Rev. Garcia-Rivera was Phi Beta Kappa and Sigma Xi. While there, he met his wife Kathy, who later pursued a degree in dance education, choreographed for the San Juan ballet and taught dance in the various places they've lived. His wife was Lutheran and even before their marriage, he began drifting away from Catholicism and attending services with her. Soon, he says, he was fully involved in the Lutheran Church.

After graduation, he attended Ohio State on a fellowship where he received his master's in electrical engineering. Another fellowship took him to the University of Washington at Seattle for his doctorate in biophysics.

Following that, the Allentown resident worked as a physicist for Boeing Corp. where pressure was applied toget him involved with nuclear projects. For a while, he refused such contracts: "I enjoyed the work, but the political atmosphere got out hand."

Out of conscience, he resigned because he didn't want to be involved with potentially lethal products, he says. "I feel strongly about the nuclear arsenal we're making. I'm dead set against it. I was certified to handle nuclear material. I know the effects of nuclear . . . " he says, his voice trailing off.